There are people who just want to be famous, for whom music happens to be their chosen route. And then there are people who want to make music, and who seem quite surprised if they become even slightly famous. At a guess, Ane Brun is in the second category. She doesnâ€™t dress up or walk in the room expecting everybody to notice her. She sits down with her guitar, and with quiet concentration sings and plays her own songs that seem as if they have grown from seeds or planted long ago, perhaps in the 1960s. Itâ€™s not that they are derivative or old fashioned, just that they have a classic quality. In Scandinavia, her second album A Temporary Dive has already sold 130,000 but I had never heard of her until it arrived in the post the other day, released in the UK on V2 Records.

The songs are all in English, with a wry humour that Iâ€™ve never run across in her British equivalents. â€˜My friend, I left you in the end, I canâ€™t believe Iâ€™m writing a song where friend rhymes with end.â€™ She didnâ€™t sing that one for us, but chose â€˜Song No 6â€™ (which features Ron Sexsmith on the recorded version) and my favourite, â€˜The Fight Song.â€™ Usually I give encouraging smiles to singers who come to sit four feet in front of me but I found myself hypnotised by the volume meters, rather than look Ane in the eye as she sang: â€˜and I will mount you, press my knees on both sides and you will let me, let me ride and if you donâ€™t then I wonâ€™t leave you galloping in my national park.â€™ Nor did I ask, after the song was over, where her national park was, exactly.

Among the albums offered as prizes was the Rough Guide to the music of Tanzania, a well chosen selection by Werner Graebner, surely the world expert in the regionâ€™s music. I had not heard most of the tracks before, and the album is a succession of revelations, notably the haunting vocal of Saida Karoli. My only grumble is that rap group X-Plastaz come too soon at track 2. Their song would have worked much better as a sort of bonus track at the end, to be skipped by those of us who find the heavy beat at odds with the flowing feel of everything else on the album. But maybe the new mode is to dump everything on your iPod and listen in random order, so track sequencing doesnâ€™t matter like it used to. Or maybe not. For me, sequencing is still an art that is often underestimated by companies and magazines who rush out their compilations and cover mounts. And I donâ€™t intend to acquire an iPod. I like walking the streets with the sounds of the city around me, not cocooned in headphones.

Last Sundayâ€™s Observer included a report on a forthcoming series of eight programmes hosted by Bob Dylan, of which the first is an hour dedicated to songs about Weather. A man after my own heart. And one who takes his sequencing very seriously. Nobody would accidentally juxtapose Judy Garland and Jimi Hendrix, and make it work. If you are curious to see the whole running order of a show that will only be heard by North Americans who have bought satellite radios capable of receiving XM100, the details are posted below, under the topic Sound of the World Forum.